The category of offenders vs. minors was established for two purposes: to separate more sharply the offenders vs. adults from the offenders vs. children, and to test the idea that there is a discrete “type” of male sexually preferring females at or just past the age of menarche.
Being an intermediate buffer group, the offenders vs. minors are motley. Perhaps as many as one fifth of them appear indistinguishable from the offenders vs. children: we see again the pedophiles, mental defectives, senile deteriorates, and drunks. Indeed, around 8 per cent of the offenders vs. minors were also convicted of offenses vs. children. On the other hand, certain varieties seen among the offenders vs. children are rarer among the offenders vs. minors: the psychotics and the cases of underdeveloped sociosexuality dwindle to the near vanishing point.
The great bulk of the offenders vs. minors may be conveniently classified into two varieties: subculture offenders and near-peer offenders.
The subculture offenders are those who belong to a portion of society, a subculture, which regards as a suitable sexual object any female past menarche, or even a prepubescent female if she is of adult size. In envisioning such a subculture one at first thinks of the rural mountain people, but this same low age limit may be found among the lower socioeconomic stratum in big cities. The existence of this subculture is clearly indicated in a tabulation of the ages of the wives of offenders vs. minors at the time of marriage. In cases of multiple marriage, the youngest wife was chosen. In the tabulation there is a bimodal distribution of cases: 25 per cent of the wives were twenty-one years old or older, rather few were twenty (5 per cent) or nineteen (10 per cent), but 17 per cent were eighteen, 19 per cent seventeen, and 15 per cent sixteen. In other words, half of the brides were aged sixteen to eighteen; about a tenth were younger. It is obvious that a man who married, say, a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old is not going to regard a fourteen- or fifteen-year-old as too young for a sexual relationship.
Among the offenders vs. children we differentiated amoral delinquents and situational cases; both of these tend to blend in with the subculture offenders when one examines offenders vs. minors. In the absence of questions and answers designed specifically to distinguish between varieties of offenders, it is hard to make a distinction between a man who has coitus with a minor because he thinks it a licit normal act and a man who is permanently or temporarily indifferent to the age of his coital partner.
A typical example of a subculture offender is a thirty-four-year-old man who had lived most of his life in Kentucky. His premarital coitus was with partners of rather widely diverse ages; in fact his first coitus, at age thirteen, was with a woman of thirty, and it is significant that he, rather than she, made the initial overtures. At nineteen he married a girl aged sixteen. The marriage was a happy one, but she died after ten years leaving him at twenty-nine a widower with two children. His postmarital life seems to have been similar to his premarital life, and by age thirty-three he was regularly dating a girl of fifteen, nearly the same age as his daughter. After three months, during which coitus was a regular occurrence, the girl’s father made the complaint that resulted in the man’s arrest and conviction. The prison psychologist’s remarks are worth quoting: “[He] cannot see that any illegality was involved. . . . The subject leads a casual life. . . . He found a mutually pleasing relationship involving few objections so he made the most of it. He is not criminally aggressive nor does he thrust himself forward where his attentions are unwanted.”
The near-peer offenders are simply males who are so close in age to their “victims” that a sexual relationship is psychologically and socially appropriate although illegal. A classic case is that of a seventeen-year-old boy and a fifteen-year-old girl. In prison, where the boy was serving six months for statutory rape, the psychologist described him as “… an embarrassed male of seventeen who had intercourse with a girl fifteen. He says she offered no protest and he thought there would be no legal complications. He has had intercourse with girls of the community for a matter of two years and saw no reason why it should not be continued. . . . [His] social group fully approves of such a pastime procedure. Much fault seems to rest in the willingness of the girls. . . .”
In some instances the age difference may seemingly be large enough to bar a person from the near-peer group—say a difference of six years. However, if the male is socially (and usually mentally) retarded while the female is precocious, he may still be classed as a near-peer case. A backward twenty-year-old who tends to associate with persons in their late teens is not far removed socially from a precocious fourteen-year-old girl who also associates chiefly with those in their late teens. Indeed, in urban juvenile gangs the gang (peer group) often has an age-range of fourteen to twenty. A liaison between an older gang leader of twenty and a “deb” of fourteen would be considered as a mating of peers.
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